How are textual and visual resources utilized to shape the images of travel destination : a multimodal analysis from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective : the case of Airbnb’s Instagram posts

Abstract

 As one of the biggest industries around the world, tourism industry has attracted researchers’ attentions. Being regarded as a social practice, tourism is recognized as a discourse (Przeclawski, 1993). During the past decades, the occurrence of the Internet has changed the trend of tourism discourse analyses. Researchers have switched their attention from analysing traditional tourism discourses to online tourism discourses. The Internet has also given birth to social media, a widely admitted marketing tool in the tourism industry. Hence, researchers (e.g. Teo, Leng & Phua, 2019) in the discourse analysis field have argued that more attention should be paid to social media. Instagram was selected as the target of this study due to its influential roles in tourism destination promoting (Hanan & Putit, 2014) and marketing (Mostaviskrae, 2018). Due to the deficiency of sharing economy discourse analyses (Cheng et al., 2016), Airbnb was chosen as the target company. This study used a multimodal discourse analysis approach to investigate Instagram posts of Airbnb, aiming to reveal brand images the company is trying to construct. The textual and visual resources used in the target discourse were identified. Attitude and Graduation under Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005) were used to analyse texts and the interactive meaning under Visual Grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2020) was adopted to analyse images. The results of text and image analysis were interpreted with theories related to tourism industry, sharing economy values and marketing. The study found that Airbnb integrated the three key values of sharing economy in its Instagram posts to build warm, hospitable and friendly brand images. The hedonic emotions, social connections established with hosts and high qualities of accommodations were highlighted across the target discourse. The study not only makes contributions to discourse analysis field but also has implications for tourism industry professionals.